Before I went on the hajj, I flew home to Kashmir from Delhi to seek advice from my father, who had been to Mecca in 1987, as a bureaucrat supervising Indian pilgrims.
He had travelled by bus through the Himalayas separating Kashmir from the Indian plains, taken a thirty-six-hour train journey to Bombay, and finally boarded a ship that sailed across the Arabian Sea to the port city of Jeddah. I had never seen the sea, but a childhood of reading tales of shipwrecks had filled me with a mortal fear of it. When my father left, I clung to his knees, and he promised to bring me a Polaroid camera. In the years since his pilgrimage, air travel has replaced sea voyages; instead of letters, pilgrims now send texts and e-mail photos from holy sites. Mecca, too, has changed. The pilgrimage, which draws between two million and three million people every year, has become a modern spectacle: it has been described by a Saudi Arabian Minister of Hajj as resembling “twenty Super Bowls in one stadium, when two million will come, and . . . these two million people will actually be taking part in playing the game.”
